Live Campaign: PPC & Facebook Ads

Launch a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Lesson Info

Live Campaign: PPC & Facebook Ads

So now we've got her campaign launched and we're live, so in this lesson we're going to talk about what do you do with your life campaign to keep the mo mentum going? So a lot of the things that you did in your pre marketing campaign is is going to continue that with your life campaign, so I'm going to use paper click adds potentially social media we're gonna go after the press, you can use your email list and then also we're going ahead and updates, which is using update tool inside the campaigns to keep your existing backers up to date and you could potentially use some contest so we go through each one of these fairly briefly because we've already sort of covered them, but we'll start off with pay per click ads. So as I mentioned before, the you know, the little known secret for people watching crowdfunding campaigns is that many of the biggest campaigns got there on account of paper click ads so in order to get a couple million dollars in sales, they potentially spent a million dol...

lars or half a million dollars on paper click ads. So for that to make sense you have to have an efficient, ad spent inefficient ad spend means that for every dollar you spend on advertising, you're getting at least say like two dollars back in revenue, so if you remember our goal calculator when you take out all the costs associated with driving the campaign and the cost of goods sold and the platform fees, et cetera, there's not necessarily a huge amount of money left over at the end, so if you spend a lot on ads and then that is subtracted in addition to all the other expenses, you may actually end up losing money, and the more you sell, the more you lose so you don't wantto spend a lot of money on ads, drive a lot of sales and lose a ton of money because of that, however, if you use the tools like at espresso and the variation testing and find an ad spend, where you can get a positive return on your ad investment and you find that if I spend a dollar, I get three dollars back, and then after all my expenses are out, I'm still making fifty cents that spend as many millions of dollars as you can, because now you're going to really make a lot of money and that's, what happens is people find our campaign is converting at an attractive rate, and so then they just drive those sales now in order to achieve those kind of big numbers, first of all, you're playing a kind of high risk game because the numbers can add up really quickly when you're spending ten thousand dollars a day or fifty thousand dollars a day on ads, so you don't want to spend that without, like, some serious confidence in your math. And so if you're not an expert in this, at this point, if you're finding that you're getting a lot of tracks and you might want to work with a digital marketing agency who has expertise in this, in addition, not only do they have to have expertise, they have to have access to the credit, because you may not have a credit card big enough to handle enough revenue. You know, enough, you know, money to drive that kind of adds, so you find an agency who knows that you're gonna have the money because they see the campaign dollars, and it makes sense than it can all work together, so you may not want to drive that yourself, but if you find that you're in a position where it's working really well, then you can reach out to some of the agencies who are doing that, like trident, but they're quite a few others that air great agencies were really good at driving mass volume in order to get one of those really huge campaigns. Now, this may not being your perfect strategy, even if you can do it, because you may find that now you've driven a really huge campaign now you've got increased scrutiny and a lot more product a ship, and you'll find that it's a lot harder to ship fifty thousand or ten thousand or something, then it is just ship one thousand or five hundred of them. The logistical and financial complications of doing a really large shipment can be quite significant, so you don't necessarily want to drive it like it's, not like a guarantee that you want to go for huge money. You want to go for something that makes sense, given your strategy so it's, not an automatic, but it is something that is a possibility, and if it's a possibility could be quite exciting and drive a really big business for you, so that's paper click ads and again refining the ads, figuring out what's, working and continuing to increase their efficiency is how that's accomplished, and the more you spend. Typically, the efficiency starts to go down because you're starting to go after bigger and bigger markets. You're not going after the same small look alike list that you're going after before, maybe, instead of, like the one percent closest you're looking at the ten percent closest, because you need millions of people not to go after, not, you know, a couple hundred thousand, so as those is it gets broader, they're less focused, their less targeted, and they made the less responsive so the cost goes up. So, again, this is part of the reason why it's so important have experts involved because you start playing a high wire game and you don't really want to screw up. So again, then we'll continue with our social media posting, so staying engaged with your backers so that the backers know what's going on with the campaign is great way to stay in gazed without necessarily sending out e mails or using the update tool so you can keep people fresh on your latest activities and keep people apprised of like the inner workings and having connected feel like they're part of what's going on. So we're just gonna continue to do more of that. And then also is you're introducing special offers you khun use, use the venue to communicate about that and try to trigger some people to come over and back the campaign taking action based on your social media posts quick, relevant question here that came in from fame media productions and their experience, something they're calling a mid campaign slump that they've got a lot of momentum starting off, they were covered in media, they were doing some of the social media things you recommended, but now that they kind of hit this mid campaign slump and they're losing momentum. Bloggers and journalists don't want to cover at the social media is not really working any tips for someone who's kind of tried some of these things, but they've hit that low are there? Are there any social media tips or anything for for them in the middle of the campaign? Well with sort is that's typical when we looked at that u shaped curve earlier and so it's very common for there to be a mid campaign slump and this is one of the reasons why shorter campaigns actually end up raising more money because the men campaign slump starts moving towards the end of the campaign sooner where things start to swing up a little and you have a shorter slump in the longer the slump is, the deeper it tends to go. That being said, there is some very good tools were to go that into a minute where you can introduce new perks to re energize people, so giving them a ballad reason to come back not just ok, we're still here and you haven't back to see it, but please coming back us, you know, so like that doesn't work that well and it's just a natural character of the campaigns that people at first you're super excited, it's, noon, and people want to jump on board and that's the normal path occasionally you have campaigns where it just catch son virally and skyrockets that's unusual and very hard to predict what's going to ring the bell like that and then the other thing you can do is if is drive it with paper click ads and like try to like flatten out that slump by pumping a lot of ad dollars and maybe even at a loss if we're trying to you know, prevent the appearance of a slump but usually it's just a natural part of being in the mid cycle and but we're going talk a minute about how you can use updates and new perks to try to counteract that now you know presses the same way when you first launching we surely mo mentum people here's an exciting new campaign and get people to cover you unless it's just going gangbusters like the bow back jacket or coolest cooler or flow high which all like broke the mold and really, you know, created more and more momentum as they went on. But those are highly unusual campaigns and just like some bands go big and become mega stars and most bands toil to make a living you know in crowdfunding there's a few campaigns that for whatever reason explode and become massive but really there's like hundreds of thousands of campaigns being launched and you're only only a handful of those get here's like that but I think I'm like a band far more of them are making decent money far more of them are actually doing pretty well without going huge and it's, because there's a pretty defined way to achieve success, which I've been covering in the last few hours. That being said at the end of the day, you know, most of them have a long slump, though you know, press can counter act that as well, so way talked a little bit that about this earlier before your campaign, you figure out who you wanted to approach. Now the campaign's going and it's live, you really want to go after people who have been covering this type of product before we found the best way to actually get in touch with people is through twitter, so actually, e mailing people tends to be, you know, they get a lot of e mails and facebook, you know, like what we found most effective is president through twitter and so we'll tweet adam say, hey, reading your stuff, making relationship with them, not just like, hey, I'm going to show you something but, like complementing their work may be retweeting their posts leading up to your campaign, so you're creating value for them. So when it's time for you to have something it's not just like a one way street, but you've been creating value for them for a little while. So now they're like, engaged and you've got your campaigns that hey check out my campaign they're more likely to cover it especially if the campaign showing momentum so I like to wait until after we've shown that early momentum then be like, hey man, come check us out we're blowing up over here on kickstarter and were blowing up I'm going to go then they come over and check it out there like, oh you are and then they might I'd be much more inclined to write about it so that's what we found you don't need to create a press release like the traditional press release in this venue we haven't found to be valuable I don't know that it valuable what we want to do is just hit him with something that's click friendly simple a nice image, a quick headline in the link to your campaign that's enough and then they'll write about it in the pull the copy off of your campaign so you don't need to take the time to write their press release they're just like you they also don't want to read they want to look at pretty pictures and they want to take the action and they don't even want to write necessarily they want to take the copy you've written and use it to create their story, so this isn't it's just what happens in the box for people are like finding cool stuff and they're using their blogged to promote it and put their own spin on it and colorized a little, but for the most part, they're just reprinting the copy in the campaign. So as you're writing your campaign, you kind of want to think about that like, is this going to be like, brought blawg friendly? So that's how we handle press? And as I mentioned, it used to be very easy to get press and now, it's quite difficult, especially if you're not getting a lot of momentum, but if you've created relationships with some press people, some journalists and show them that you care and that you're reading their stuff and you're creating value for them, my gosh, you're much, much, much more likely to get some good results if you're just showing up for the first time that never heard of you before and you're like, do me this huge favor? Well, you can't be surprised if they're not compelled by your offer, so unless they've got something, you've got something so exciting that they can't help it cover nick's products are a lot easier if you like focused on beer and you've got a bear product it's going to be a lot easier to get coverage through beer enthusiast magazines and blog's, then it is to get written about something in general consumer friendly. So consumer electronics. Stuff like that has become so commonplace. There's, so much competition. It's, hard to be heard above the noise.

Class Description

Crowdfunding is becoming a more widespread way for passionate entrepreneurs to fund their projects, and yet the process of creating a campaign that engages, sells, and excels can be overwhelming. Now is the time to learn how to do it right in Launch a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign with Christopher Hawker. Chris has been so successful crowdfunding that his first campaign was funded 5538% over its goal.

Chris and his team have brought dozens of products to market – setting records in fundraising and earning accolades in The New York Times, Fast Company, and TechCrunch. In this class, Chris will help you develop a winning strategy for each and every stage of the crowdfunding process – from ensuring your product or idea is ready, to choosing the right platform to launching, maintaining, and marketing a campaign. Not only do you get the incredibly valuable financial calculator bonus material that breaks down the numbers for so you can figure out the exact dollar amount for your campaign goal and campaign perks.

You will also learn how to:

Develop, set and reach your funding goals

Craft a compelling campaign page to help sell your idea

Make a compelling video and build buzz on social media

Attract new backers and develop stand-out marketing for your campaign

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a designer, an inventor, or an artist, this class will help you give you the strategies and tactics as well as the confidence you need to make your campaign a huge financial success.

Dyan deNapoli

Really helpful class for anyone planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign! Christopher was a great presenter (very comfortable and relaxed), and he clearly knew the topic extremely well. His presentation was very thorough and well thought out. One thing I would've like to have seen is more questions taken from the virtual audience. There were quite a few on the thread, but the moderator only passed along a few of them to Christopher to answer. Another thing that would have been very helpful is advice about creating successful crowdfunding campaigns that are for projects or experiences or ideas, rather than for physical products (which this class was focused on). Maybe Christopher can do a short crowdfunding part II class?? But I still give this class an A+!

Elizabeth Best

This was very helpful. I feel like it answered so many of my questions. It made me realize what a huge commitment crowdfunding is! As an entrepreneur I can see how this video saves trident a lot of time on calls and emails explaining what needs to be done. Great idea! I am amazed at how much technology is involved and online or social media marketing. I better develop a stronger team with millennials who know how to make it happen. Thank you.

David McNichols

Chris goes into the depth required to own this material in a way that is both essential and inspiring. Although my best friend launched 10 out of 11 successful Kickstarter projects, I could not learn from him through osmosis all the amazing material Chris has covered here in detail! The patent research information alone makes it worth the price! I highly recommend this course.